Status: Allsky needs configuring

[WEdward2]

Hello,
I have just start working on getting AllSky up and running on a Raspberry Pi 4B hardware with HQ camera. After the installation of the AllSky Software, I reviewed/updated the Allsky Config, reloaded Allsky (and ended up rebooting the Hardware later). But when I go into Allsky it continues to show: Status: Allsky needs configuring.

Is there a log or something that would give me an idea what else may need to be configured before it starts capturing images?

Thank you for any assistance you can provide.
Wm Edwards

[EricClaeys]

What version of Allsky did you install, and what version did you used to have?
Can you attach a screenshot of the message?

After an upgrade, you need to review the settings to make sure everything looks good (it should), then manually start Allsky. I improved the message but don't remember if it's in the current release or the next one.
We do this "just in case" something got hosed up in the installation.

[WEdward2]

This is a new install. And yes I went into the Allsky Settings menu and think I have updated needed modifications (but using a lot of defaults).

Web User Interface (WebUI)
Status: Allsky needs configuring
Version: v2024.12.06_02
Local Website

[EricClaeys]

Thanks. A screenshot of the message would be helpful.
Your last post had the URL to the WebUI, which when I clicked on it took me to MY WebUI.

[WEdward2]

[WEdward2]

Do you want to see all of the options, I can send multiple screen prints....

[WEdward2]

And I just tried setting the Allsky Settings back to the default and then just defining a few required settings, saved and restsarted Allsky. BUT it continues to show the Status: Allsky needs configuring....

[EricClaeys]

That's not a very helpful message, is it? I will improve it in the next release.

UPDATED:

Before doing anything else, please go to the Getting Support page in the WebUI and follow the instructions, then upload the log file it produces. It will provide information I need to troubleshoot any problems.

After doing that, click the blue "Save changes" button. It may say that there were no changes so Allsky was NOT restarted. If so, go to the "System" page and click in the "Start Allsky" button.

After installation there should have been a "System Messages" box near the top of the page that gave a more detailed message like "Check the settings below and change if needed. If they are OK, just click on the "Save changes" button. Did you see that?

[EricClaeys]

@WEdward2,
FYI, I just created Issue #4474 to improve the message. Would you please look at it and let me know if I described the problem correctly?

[WEdward2]

Sorry Im not sure I understand your previous response.
When I opened this message, I had already done the items listed under "Getting Support", so you should have gotten the log. I'll try to do it again.
I've hit the blue "Save Changes" button and it saved the changes. BUT I still have the yellow "Status: Allsky needs Configuring" message at the top of the page. If I goto to the SYSTEM Tab and hit the Green "Start Allsky" button,,,nothing appears to happen and the Allsky WebUI becomes unresponsive. I've let it for 30-minutes but it appears to be hung. I have to reboot the Raspberry Pi 4 hardware.
I see no "Systems Messages box near the top of the page.

Ideas? Am I doing something incorrectly?

[EricClaeys]

First off, I apologize for not welcoming you to the Allsky community in my initial reply. I always try to welcome new members, so WELCOME!! Once you get things up and running, I'll think you'll enjoy having your camera. I've really enjoyed mine which is at my observatory and use it to look at sky conditions before deciding to take pictures.

The log file created by the "Getting Support" steps wasn't included in your original post. Please attach that support log, THEN create another one and attach it. That will give me two logs that I can compare.

You did nothing incorrectly. There's a bug (or two?) somewhere in Allsky.

[WEdward2]

Thanks for the Welcome! I recently had my old All-Sky Camera made by MoonGlow Technologies die after working flawlessly for about 15+ Years. Unfortunately Moonglow no longer makes their camera so I decided to try the Raspberry Pi route. So this has been a bit of a learning curve as I have never used Raspberry Pi and it's been a few years since I've used any version of Linux. So Im having fun trying to get this all dialed in.

[EricClaeys]

I initially looked at buying a pre-made camera, but they were all over $1000 and had pretty lousy cameras. I never heard of a Raspberry Pi until I made my first camera. I worked at Bell Labs which invented UNIX (which is what Linux is based on), so am very familiar with it and with C. I knew nothing about Python and PHP until I started working on Allsky.

We can always use more developers so if you're interested, let me know. We have a very long backlog of things we want to implement; some pretty easy and some pretty difficult.

[WEdward2]

support-4473-20250328154902.zip
support-4473-20250328110643.zip

Both log resent

[EricClaeys]

Perfect. Thanks

[WEdward2]

And if I didn't mention it, This is a Raspberry Pi 4b hardware with the latest OS installed onto a new microSD card. I then installed RealVNC Server (so that I could remote into the hardware), followed by the AllSky software. So it's a completely new installation of software.

[WEdward2]

Also I entered: sudo systemctl status allsky command and got this:

allsky.service - AllSky Camera Service
     Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/allsky.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
     Active: inactive (dead)

Is the Active: inactive (dead) normal? The WEBUI appears to be running....

[WEdward2]

I entered the following commands (from your doc):
sudo systemctl stop allsky
cd ~/allsky
./allsky.sh

And Allsky now appears to be running, but with new error messages:

[EricClaeys]

No, getting Active: inactive (dead) is not normal, and I don't even know what that means.

Here's what I get:

 allsky.service - AllSky Camera Service
     Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/allsky.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
     Active: active (running) since Tue 2025-03-25 21:03:40 MDT; 2 days ago
   Main PID: 931303 (allsky.sh)
      Tasks: 8 (limit: 9559)
        CPU: 13h 20min 21.182s
     CGroup: /system.slice/allsky.service
             931303 /bin/bash /home/pi/allsky/allsky.sh
             931437 /home/pi/allsky/bin/capture_ZWO -debuglevel 3 -cmd "" -cameramodel ASI585MC -cameranumber 0 ...
Mar 28 14:58:13 allsky-new allsky[931437]:   > Sleeping: 60.9 sec
Mar 28 14:58:13 allsky-new allsky[1351375]: saveImage.sh DAY /home/pi/allsky/tmp/image-20250328145812.jpg DATE=20250328 TIME=145812 AUTOEXPOSURE=0 sAUTOEXPOSURE= EXPOSURE_US=79928 sEXPOSURE=79.9>
Mar 28 14:58:14 allsky-new allsky[1351375]: NUM_IMAGES=58: Not creating mini-timelapse: 2 images(s) left in frequency.
Mar 28 14:59:14 allsky-new allsky[931437]: -----
Mar 28 14:59:14 allsky-new allsky[931437]: STARTING EXPOSURE at: 2025-03-28 14:59:14   @ 79.93 ms (0.08 sec)
Mar 28 14:59:14 allsky-new allsky[931437]:   > GOT IMAGE @ mean 0.492, gain 0.
Mar 28 14:59:14 allsky-new allsky[931437]:   > Good image: mean 0.492 within range of 0.480 to 0.520 +++++++++

The lines that start with "Mar 28" are from the Allsky log file.
Try running tail -f=20 /var/log/allsky.log to make sure the log file is being updated.

FYI, some nomenclature:
The WebUI is just a series of web pages and so only "runs" when you go to the page or refresh it. The image in the "Live View" page is automatically refreshed every minute or so, but other pages like "Allsky Settings" just display information then stop.
When we say "Allsky is running" it means it's taking pictures which it does this via the capture_ZWO and capture_RPi programs. When you start Allsky it starts one of those programs, and when you stop Allsky it stops the program that's running.

[WEdward2]

I think for some reason Allsky was not starting when I entered sudo systemctl start allsky.
After I enter the

sudo systemctl stop allsky
cd ~/allsky
./allsky.sh

commands it appears to have started up and it now taking pictures.

I'm going to try shutting everything down, powering off the hardware and then restart again to see what result I get.

[EricClaeys]

FYI, with Linux you almost never need to reboot or power it off, although it doesn't hurt if you do. We make people reboot after the first installation (like you did) only because we then know what state their Pi is in. And if you add a locale during the installation, a reboot is needed. I almost never reboot my Pi. Linux definitely is light years ahead of Windows in that regard.

[EricClaeys]

The brown message is as expected. Click its first line to see what it expects you to do. If you already did it, click the second line to get rid of that message (you may need to refresh the browser before the message goes away).

The "You are using a default daytime overlay" message is also as expected. Several overlay templates for popular cameras come with Allsky and cannot be updated by users. The installation picks the most appropriate overlay template based on your camera; when you first go to the Overlay Editor, it uses that template and gives you that message. To continue, just click where it says to, and you then save a COPY of the template giving it a name. Any changes you make are stored in the copy.
We know this is confusing so are improving it in the next release.

@Alex-developer,
Any thought on why the two red messages are appearing on a brand new Allsky install?

[WEdward2]

No idea.

OK so I shutdown allsky, then shutdown the Hardware. Powered on the hardware, the OS loaded, but Allsky did not start.
I then entered sudo systemctl start allsky but nothing appeared to happen, after waiting for about 2-minutes, I did a CNTL-C, then entered:

sudo systemctl stop allsky
cd ~/allsky
./allsky.sh

Allsky then started up and is taking pictures again. So it appears to be working, but is not automatically starting at power up and OS boot. Ideas?

[WEdward2]

support-4473-20250328172708.zip

[Alex-developer]

@EricClaeys The overlay errors are odd.

In both of the support logs the overlays exists and are correctly linked from the settings file. The permissions also all look fine. There are some errors in the lighttpd log which I will take look at, it appears that its trying to read a directory as the overlay. Again not sure why as everything looks fine in the config files

Few other points

Active: inactive (dead) - Simply means the service is configured correctly but not running

Something I spotted in the ps listing

william     3986    3976  0 17:21 pts/0    00:00:00 bash
william     4885    3986  0 17:22 pts/0    00:00:00 /bin/bash ./allsky.sh
william     5192    4885  1 17:22 pts/0    00:00:04 /home/william/allsky/bin/capture_RPi -debuglevel 1 -cmd rpicam-still -cameramodel HQ -cameranumber 0 -locale en_US.utf8 -config /home/william/allsky/tmp/capture_args.txt

www-data   10436    1561  0 17:27 ?        00:00:00 sh -c export ALLSKY_HOME=/home/william/allsky; export SUDO_OK="true"; /home/william/allsky/support.sh --auto
www-data   10437   10436  0 17:27 ?        00:00:00 /bin/bash /home/william/allsky/support.sh --auto
www-data   10573   10437 99 17:27 ?        00:00:00 ps -efw

So as was pointed out it is starting from bash but not systemctl which in itself is a little strange however when looking at the allsky.log file in the latest support info we have

2025-03-27T15:10:06.782999-04:00 allsky allsky[1191]:      ***** Starting Allsky *****
2025-03-27T15:10:07.735124-04:00 allsky allsky[1191]: *** ===== Allsky needs to be configured before it can be used.  See the WebUI.
2025-03-27T15:10:07.799082-04:00 allsky allsky[1191]: Stopping Allsky: Allsky needs to be configured.
2025-03-27T15:10:09.498792-04:00 allsky allsky[1191]:      ***** Allsky Stopped *****

I don't capture syslog in the support info but I would check what's in /var/log/syslog look for lines like

2025-03-23T22:58:17.988229+00:00 allskydev systemd[1]: Started allsky.service - AllSky Camera Service.
2025-03-23T22:58:17.993262+00:00 allskydev systemd[1]: Started allskyperiodic.service - AllSky Periodic Services (Modules).

This is from my dev system which started ok but if its failing there could be some errors logged.

Alex

[WEdward2]

Is there a program/app that can be used to view/print SYSLOG ?

[Alex-developer]

Is there a program/app that can be used to view/print SYSLOG ?

There maybe but its not something I have ever used, I am old school and use text editors !!!

You could try the foilowing and we can check the syslog file for you

Open a command prompt then type

cd /tmp
cp /var/log/syslog ./
gzip -9 syslog

That will create a file in /tmp called syslog.gz if you can attach that here we can check it for you

[EricClaeys]

@Alex-developer,
I fixed these lighttpd errors in v2025.xx.xx:

FastCGI-stderr:PHP Warning:  Undefined variable $networks in /home/william/allsky/html/includes/configureWiFi.php on line 90
FastCGI-stderr:PHP Warning:  opendir(/home/william/allsky/images): Failed to open directory:
      No such file or directory in /home/william/allsky/html/includes/days.php on line 40
FastCGI-stderr:PHP Warning:  opendir(/home/william/allsky/images): Failed to open directory:
     No such file or directory in /home/william/allsky/html/includes/functions.php on line 649

For the 2nd and 3rd ones, the files first check if ALLSKY_IMAGES exists, and if not, displays a warning in the WebUI. If a user tried to access the "Images" page in the WebUI prior to Allsky being fully installed, the ALLSKY_IMAGES directory may not exist.

I have no idea what's causing these:

(connections.c.714) invalid request-line -> sending Status 400 (192.168.1.254)
(connections.c.714) unexpected TLS ClientHello on clear port (192.168.1.212)

You can fix this:

PHP Notice:  file_get_contents(): Read of 12288 bytes failed with errno=21 Is a directory in
     /home/william/allsky/html/includes/overlayutil.php on line 680

Here's the offending code:

In the first log (support-4473-20250328154902.zip) the daytimeoverlay and nighttimeoverlay are empty, which causes $overlayFilename to be empty on lines 672 and 674, which then causes line 678 to be a DIRECTORY, not a file.

I don't know why those settings were empty since the installation log file has:

Thu Mar 27 03:08:53 PM EDT 2025 * Using overlay 'overlay-RPi_HQ-4056x3040-both.json'.
Thu Mar 27 03:08:53 PM EDT 2025 *     OVERLAY_NAME: daytimeoverlay = overlay-RPi_HQ-4056x3040-both.json, TYPE=text
Thu Mar 27 03:08:54 PM EDT 2025 *     OVERLAY_NAME: nighttimeoverlay = overlay-RPi_HQ-4056x3040-both.json, TYPE=text

[EricClaeys]

@Alex-developer,
I think the above explains the first red message:

[EricClaeys]

@WEdward2,

I think for some reason Allsky was not starting when I entered sudo systemctl start allsky

Someone a few days ago had this same problem, and it was because his SD card was bad and needed to be replaced. Hopefully that's not the case with you.

Please run sudo systemctl start allsky; echo RETURN = $? and let me know what it says RETURN is.

The "syslog" @Alex-developer ask for will hopefully tell us why it's failing.

Whatever's causing this problem also keeps Allsky from starting automatically when you reboot.

---

Let me take back what I said earlier:

No, getting Active: inactive (dead) is not normal, and I don't even know what that means.

When I stop Allsky I get Active: inactive (dead) since Sat 2025-03-29 01:05:57 MDT; 2s ago.

The difference in yours and mine is that the allsky server has never run so there's no "since ...", and I've never seen that - I always have seen what I got.

---

Regarding your original post about Status: Allsky needs configuring still appearing even after you saved changes, two things are going on:

1. Pressing the "Save changes" button saves your changes but doesn't restart Allsky since "systemctl start allsky" isn't working, so the status of Allsky doesn't change.
2. The message is only updated when you visit the page or refresh it.

After you manually start Allsky, what does the message say if you go to the WebUI and refresh the page?

[WEdward2]

So I stopped Allsky and then entered: sudo systemctl start allsky; echo RETURN = $?
IT took several seconds, but I received:

Job for allsky.service cancelled.
Return = 1

But WebUI shows the Status = Restarting for about the last 5-minutes so far.

You last question, after I manually start it using the shell command, WebUI shows a status of running.

[EricClaeys]

I'm pretty sure systemctl not working is a Linux problem and not an Allsky problem.
Try this:

cd
sudo strace systemctl start allsky > strace.txt 2>&1

Then attach ~/strace.txt. It will contain a list of all the things systemctl is doing and will hopefully tell us why it's failing.

---

You said:

But WebUI shows the Status = Restarting for about the last 5-minutes so far.
You last question, after I manually start it using the shell command, WebUI shows a Status = running.

When did it show "Restarting" ? After the failed sudo systemctl start allsky? Remember that the status is only updated when you go to a web page or refresh it, so if you don't refresh the page, it'll say Restarting forever.

The status on the WebUI doesn't care how Allsky started, so showing Running after manually starting Allsky is correct.

[WEdward2]

The only thing recorded in the strace.txt is:
"Job for allsky.service canceled."

[WEdward2]

Sorry I have been dealing with Family issues. I'll review your last couple of post on Monday afternoon and respond.
Thanks for taking the time...
Bill